Hypocrisy Watch category archive

As a follow-up to this, now comes this:

Cincinnati Landlord Jamie Hein asked the Ohio Civil Rights Commission to reconsider its ruling that Hein had discriminated against a young black girl by posting a “Whites Only” sign at a public pool. The Commission said, “nope!” and upheld its decision 4-0 without discussion.

Rational (heated, but rational) commentary at the link.

Mike Gruss, writing in my local rag, considers the tendency of beseiged companies to change their names to something vaguely latinate and altogether uncommunicative so as to outrun their reputations. He mentions, Philip Morris Altria and Bell Atlantic/NYNEX Verizon (but unaccountably leaves out Southwestern Bell Cingular not-your-father’s AT&T).

Then he focuses on Swampwater, now T/A Xe Academi. A nugget:

Blackwater, once headquartered in Moyock, N.C., is dead, but only kind of. The name still lives in video games and T-shirts and in lawsuits and news stories, but is not the property of the new company. Xe always was viewed as a joke, a transparent attempt to play on America’s short-term memory when we’re more sophisticated than that.

Academi may be a top-notch training school, or it may be a place Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped by in “Total Recall.” No one knows because they’ve never seen the word before.

Then the natural instinct is to be afraid.

Which, given Blackwater’s history and pending lawsuits, might not be a bad thing.

A mercenary by any other name is still a gun for hire.

A few days ago, Chicago Tribune columnist Dennis Byrne invested energy in attempting to justify the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq. Here’s a bit:

We well know about the horrible costs of the war: almost 4,500 American troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis killed and more than $1 trillion spent. But while we’ve heard a lot about the cost side of this equation, we’ve heard not so much about the benefit side. It’s as if there was no benefit.

And a good way to calculate the benefits is to ask: What if President George W. Bush and Congress had decided in 2003 not to attack the tyrannical and murderous regime of Saddam Hussein? With the support of much of the American public.

He proceeds to waste a couple hundred words trying to prove that sending persons to die for a lie is somehow a worthy exercise in the common weal.

I suggest you read it. We are likely to hear more of this sort of revisionist drivel from the “war is always good” crowd over the coming years.

Click for a larger image.

What John Cole said, especially the penultimate sentence of the middle paragraph.

In the Guardian, George Monbiot considers how the rich conclude that wealth equals virtue:

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy.

Click to read the rest.

Annette John-Hall considers wingnut reaction to a black talk radio jock’s statement that black folks should support President Obama because he’s black.

Aside: I’m old enough to remember white folks saying that white folks should support George Wallace because he was white and right (wing, that is).

Here’s a snippet from the article:

Is this call to blackness that Joyner espouses some kind of diabolical plot, some secret code intended to erase the post-racial nirvana some think we achieved with the election of a black president?

I could almost see Jason Johnson, professor of political science at Hiram College in Ohio, rolling his eyes.

“Identity politics is only a problem when minorities do it. Whites do it all the time,” Johnson argues.

“It’s absolutely naive to question the unified behavior of a minority group, given the fact that [historically] the majority has always been unified in their oppression.”

He’s got a point there. I guess there’s a reason it took us so long to get to our first black president.

Read the whole thing.

Underneath all the guff, the reality that apologists for the Confederacy refuse to face (or wish to conceal–depending on the apologist) is that slavery was ultimately about trading persons as in the markets and then using them, like draft animals:

One hundred and fifty years after the start of the nation’s bloodiest war, the audience sat rapt as a professor displayed a screen image of a single page in a slaveowner’s account book that showed slavery was today’s equivalent of a $100 million-a-year business.

Bob Molinaro, discussing rumors of another college conference reshuffle in my local rag:

. . . yet another reminder that television and boosters – not administrators – call the shots at the top of the football food chain.

(snip)

As you may have noticed, tradition in college sports doesn’t exist anymore. Unless you’re talking about the tradition of winking at ethics and decency.

NCAA is holding a retreat to consider ways to fix the cesspool that is big time NCAA athletics.

The Boston Globe has an excellent editorial on this. Here’s a bit:

The meeting comes in the wake of a torturous spring of embarrassments for collegiate sports. They include the NCAA’s stripping the University of Southern California of its 2004-2005 football title because of illegal payments to running back Reggie Bush, the resignation of Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel after players got illegal gifts from the owner of a local tattoo parlor, the suspension of University of Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun for recruiting violations, and an ongoing investigation of the University of Tennessee’s football and basketball programs.

My guess is that they will be more concerned with whitewash than with deep cleaning.

I’ve lost interest in college sports. The parade of cheating–in the front offices, not on the fields–the exploitation of the players, and the sell outs to the media have done me in.

I’ll watch the bowl games on New Year’s Day, but that’s about it.

At Tampa Bay dot com, columnist Don Wright has prepared a medley of politicians’ apologies for bad behavior, complete with footnotes.

It is most delightful how they all flow together into one mind-numbing procession of puerile phrase-mongering.

No excerpt. Just hop over there and have a look.

Keeping the privileged from hiding their dirty linen in the UK.

I have to say that twits might have actually found a positive use for twitting.

The child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is in the news again. This time, the statute of limitations has not expired and there have been arrests, including the arrest of a church official in charge of overseeing priests for endangering children.

I tend to avoid discussing this; I’ve known enough good, dedicated priests, priests who work hard to do right and to do the right things that I do not wish to see them wounded more than they already have been by the actions of their management.

For it has ultimately a management problem. Weakness amongst clergy of all religions and persuasions is not uncommon. The crime was the cover-up.

In this situation, the cover-up was truly worse than the crimes, for the cover-up protected abusers so that they could continue to abuse.

Nevertheless, in the face of this, in which an honest man is punished for honesty, . . .

In a move that infuriated some students, Chestnut Hill College abruptly terminated the teaching contract of an adjunct professor, saying his 15-year relationship with another man defied Roman Catholic Church teachings.

(snip)

On Friday, though, the college issued a statement accusing him not only of being gay, which it called contrary to traditional Catholic doctrine, but also of misrepresenting before he was hired that he was a member of an independent branch of Catholicism.

He denied both accusations Saturday, saying he never hid his sexuality or his affiliation with the Old Catholic Apostolic Church of the Americas from school officials.

The college recruited him, not the other way around, he said. In a meeting with officials, he recalled asking: “You know I’m not a Roman Catholic priest, right?“

. . . it is difficult to think that the American Catholic Church–the management, not the persons on the ground trying to do right–has become little more than RICO in robes.

Afterthought:

Ronnie Polaneczky addressed the firing of the professor, Father Jim St. George, in her column yesterday.

Bob Cesca highlights the Department of Inconsistency, Double Standards Division, as regards a warning about a video game.

(Link fixed.)

The worst aspect of priestly abuse amongst the Catholic priesthood was not the abuse. It was bad and worse, but not worst.

You will find sickos in every profession, though they are more noticeable when their career choice entails publicly scolding others for their behavior.

The worst aspect was that management not only failed to stop it, but also covered it up for decades.

Now a jury has hit management where it hurts: in the budget:

A jury awarded abuse survivor John Vai $30 million in damages for the childhood sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of defrocked priest Francis DeLuca today, and found that St. Elizabeth’s Parish was grossly negligent in its failure to supervise DeLuca in the late 1960s, and should pay at least $3 million of that damage award.

Sometimes, eventually is a long, long time, but eventually it arrives.

Wasserman:

Read this. It is too good to excerpt.

More here. Listen to the interview at the link or read the transcript, if you do nothing else.

Blue Cross used to be non-profit. Now it is non-principled:

After months of fierce insurance industry opposition to the bill, Blue Cross is working secretively with conservative front group American Legislative Exchange Council to use the issue of states’ rights as a pretext to declaring health reform unconstitutional.

The next step, of course, will be to close the public schools hospitals rather than admit darkies non-rich patients.